The X### series of cards are the next series after the 9### series. Some of
the added features are (from
www.beyond3d.com):
a.. SMARTSHADER HD
a.. Support of DirectX9 Programmable Vertex and Pixel Shaders
b.. VS2.0 Vertex Shader functionality
a.. Up to 65,280 instructions including loops and subroutines.
b.. Single Cycle Trigonometric Operations (SIN & COS)
c.. DirextX9 Extended Pixel Shaders
a.. Up to 1,536 instructions and 16 textures per rendering pass
b.. 2nd Generations F-Buffer support for unlimited Shader instruction
lengths
c.. 32 temporary and constant registers
d.. Facing register for two-sided lighting
e.. Multiple render target support
f.. Shadow volume rendering acceleration
g.. 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point colour formats
a.. SMOOTHVISION HD
a.. 3Dc Normal Map Compression
a.. High quality 4:1 Normal Map Compression
b.. Works with any two-channel data format
b.. 2x/4x/6x Multi-Sampling full scene Anti-Aliasing modes, adaptive
algorithm with programmable sample patterns and colour buffer compression
c.. Temporal Anti-Aliasing
d.. Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1)at all resolutions, including
widescreen HDTV resolutions
e.. 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
a.. HYPER Z HD
a.. 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
b.. Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 48:1)
c.. Fast Z-Buffer Clear
d.. Z Cache Optimisations for shadow rendering
e.. Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including
widescreen HDTV resolutions
a.. VIDEOSHADER HD
a.. Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video FULLSTREAM video
de-blocking technology
b.. Noise removal filtering for captured video
c.. MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and colour space
conversion
d.. All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
e.. YPrPb component output
f.. Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
Essentially you're getting far better pixel shader performance, which is a
technology used by pretty much every graphically intensive game released
within the past 2-3 years. You also get generally better all-around 3D
performance.
The downside to the X800 is that it's impossible/very difficult to find an
AGP version. Everything has gone to PCI-Express these days, so if you have
an AGP slot, it would be best to stick with what you have or get the 9800.
Otherwise it means upgrading your motherboard (and usually this means CPU
and RAM too).
Of course, if all you need is a good video capture, why not look at a
dedicated TV Tuner card? ATI has their TV Wonder series, and Nvidia has
some offerings, and there are other companies too. This will be much
cheaper than a whole new video card.
